Google vimdocs with a custom search engine

Feb 15, '13

Feb 15, 2013

Here’s a quick tip: if you can’t find what you’re looking for in Vim’s built-in documentation, use a search engine instead. All of Vim’s documentation is online at vimdoc.sourceforge.net, so it’s indexed by Google & Co. If you create a custom search engine for your browser, then you can easily limit your searches to only return results from vimdoc.sourceforge.net.

You can add a custom search engine in Chrome by right-clicking on the address bar (or holding the ctrl key while clicking it), then selecting the “Edit Search engines…” item from the contextual menu. That opens up a settings tab where you can edit your custom search engines:

The %s item in the URL is a placeholder that will be replaced with whatever text I enter when I use this custom search engine.

Suppose that I want to find the documentation on search offsets. I press cmd-L to focus the address bar, then I type v followed by a space. The address bar brings up a prompt to indicate that I’m using the custom Vimdocs search engine:

After typing my query, I hit enter and it shows the search engine results page:

Note that I mis-spelled search and offset, but Google guessed what I wanted and served the results for my corrected query. Search engines are more liberal in what they accept than Vim’s built-in :help and :helpgrep commands.

This trick is especially useful if you don’t know the helptag for the item that you want to know more about. If you can come up with a query that contains enough words to identify the right page of the documentation, then you can usually find what you’re looking for.

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